Daniel Shays's Honorable Rebellion: An American Story

by Daniel Bullen

On January 25, 1787, in Springfield, Massachusetts, militia Major General William Shepard ordered his cannon to fire grapeshot at a peaceful demonstration of 1,200 farmers approaching the federal arsenal. The shots killed four and wounded twenty, marking the climax of five months of civil disobedience in Massachusetts, where farmers challenged the state’s authority to seize their farms for flagrantly unjust taxes. Government leaders and influential merchants painted these protests as a violent attempt to overthrow the state, in hopes of garnering support for strengthening the federal government in a Constitutional Convention. As a result, the protests have been hidden for more than two hundred years under the misleading title, “Shays’s Rebellion, the armed uprising that led to the Constitution.” But this widely accepted narrative is just a legend: the “rebellion” was almost entirely nonviolent, and retired Revolutionary War hero Daniel Shays was only one of many leaders. 
    Daniel Shays’s Honorable Rebellion: An American Story by Daniel Bullen tells the history of the crisis from the protesters’ perspective. Through five months of nonviolent protests, the farmers kept courts throughout Massachusetts from hearing foreclosures, facing down threats from the government, which escalated to the point that Governor James Bowdoin ultimately sent an army to arrest them. Even so, the people won reforms in an electoral landslide. 
    Thomas Jefferson called these protests an honorable rebellion, and hoped that Americans would never let twenty years pass without such a campaign, to rein in powerful interests. This riveting and meticulously researched narrative shows that Shays and his fellow protesters were hardly a dangerous rabble, but rather a proud people who banded together peaceably, risking their lives for justice in a quintessentially American story. 

Genres: History

320 pages, Hardcover

Published November 11, 2021

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Devon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting history about the stark divide between economic classes in Massachusetts. Although almost two centuries have passed, the spirit regulators that took part of Daniel Shay's honorable rebellion, continues to pop up in political movements.

Wealthy elites continue to oppress the less fortunate, and capital has become exponentially more concentrated in the hands of few. If anything, this story challenges the reader when it asks; how far are you willing to go to fight tyranny? The underlying issue, classism and political elitism, is still a fundamental problem. However, the story proves how backwards our common values have become. Arguably the greatest trick of all has convinced the American people that the top 20% aren't the problem. Great local read that paints the Shaysites in a totally new light.

By the way, if you grew up in western MA you will recognize a lot of key players. Mattoon and Boltwood in Amherst, as well as the Graves family in Springfield. Also, screw Adams.

[Ginny Rockwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

An historical narrative of the events that played out in western Massachusetts in the later 1700s. All the more poignant for me since I live there and am familiar with most locations.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inhabitants of Western Mass should not purchase Sam Adams beer

[Bob Groves · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting addition to the small number of books about this important event. Very early days of the Republic but the lines were already clearly drawn between the merchant class and the ordinary citizen.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides a revisionistic and immersive account of one of the most important events of the early United States. Daniel Bullen makes a convincing case that the struggling farmers of western Massachusetts involved in Daniel Shays's Honorable Rebellion (1786-1787) were justified in their acts of armed resistance against unjust taxation levied by elites in eastern Massachusetts. It was founding father Thomas Jefferson who labeled their actions as “honorable.” Yes, the events did much to inspire the creation of the US Constitution, but it is also an example “of our proud American tradition of solidarity and resistance in the face of unjust authority” (p. 28). The protests were conducted almost entirely peacefully and, thankfully, were eventually successful for the common people of Massachusetts. Bullen brings a novelist’s flair to his storytelling that engrosses the reader in events that occurred hundreds of years ago. The style is comparable to Shelby Foote’s work in his great The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-1974).

**
Title: Daniel Shays's Honorable Rebellion: An American Story
Author: Daniel Bullen
Year: 2021
Genre: Nonfiction - New England history, US history
Page count: 440 pages
Date(s) read: 12/2/23 - 12/7/23
Reading journal entry #229 in 2023
**

Additional quotes:

“I FOUND THIS STORY ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD and took it home with me. Literally, this book started when I saw a “Daniel Shays Highway” road sign northbound on Massachusetts Route 202, between Pelham and Shutesbury. When I came home and looked up this Daniel Shays fellow, I found a story that had basically been discarded to the care of an inaccurate legend.” (p. 17).
*

"I settled on a firm rule: where facts existed, either in the primary sources or in the research, I would neither ignore or alter them. The story would remain nonfiction because reality deserves to be described on its own terms. But at the same time, I refused to let the absence of documentation sap the living experience from the narrative. There are plenty of things we can know without records.” (pp. 19-20).
*

This book “tells the story from the people’s perspective, allowing them to speak in their own voices as much as possible, as the crisis unfolded week to week, and Daniel Shays and the dozens of other leaders and the thousands of men and their families were forced to make hard decisions, up to the point of risking their lives, in order to protect what was important to them. I offer this narrative to professional historians and general readers alike, in hopes that it will scour away a tarnishing, misleading myth and remind us of our proud American tradition of solidarity and resistance in the face of unjust authority.” (p. 28).
*

“Two years before the Declaration of Independence, the farmers of Massachusetts had obstructed the king’s courts and governed themselves through town meetings and county conventions, passing laws, levying taxes, and working with other towns to arrange for their common defense. With this precedent in their minds, the farmers clamored to march to the courts as they had done before the war, to interrupt unjust authority and demand that the government’s laws respect the people.” (pp. 65-6)
*

“In the swamps and lakes where they hunted ducks and geese at dawn, some men predicted that Bowdoin’s fever of fear would feed on itself until blood had to be shed. In hushed tones behind their hunting blinds, they confessed their fear that nothing would change till the sound of gunshots and lamentations on either side showed the influential men in Boston that they and the farmers depended on each other and suffered one fate together.” (p. 167)
*

“The families who had opened their homes to them knew these stories. Most of them had already taken sides simply by being cash-poor farmers. They knew well enough how merchants in cities wrote laws to squeeze profits out of the people. The farmers had fled to Vermont from the coasts of Connecticut and Massachusetts. They had accepted the trials of setting up farms in rocky hills, far from commercial centers, to get away from precisely these injustices.” (p. 282)
*

“These forests had been neglected for a generation. For thousands of years, Mohican and Abenaki people had maintained the hills, burning out underbrush to clear the forests for hunting and to encourage the nut-bearing hickories, chestnuts, and oaks. But ever since the natives had been driven out of these hills at the end of the French and Indian War, the forests had been sliding back toward wild nature.” (p. 300-1)
*

“Their campaign of peaceful and dignified protests had finally released them from Governor Bowdoin’s oppressions.” (p. 319).
*

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is an interesting one, and because it takes place here in Western Massachusetts, doubly so for me. It is also an important but lesser known story in the development of The United States. The author’s thesis is an interesting take. He contends that the farmers of this area were forced to take up arms by a corrupt and greedy monied class that held sway in the newly independent state. Despite being portrayed as a violent mob bent on tyranny, they never fired their muskets in anger, even when fired upon. My one quibble with the book is that the author, a writer rather than a historian by training, peppers the narrative with assumptions about participants’ thoughts and experiences at various points in the story, something that should only be done, and then sparingly, when a primary source can confirm it (e.g a personal letter). The writing can also be a bit dull in parts. Still, all and all, a worthy addition to our understanding of this pivotal moment in the early days of the republic.